“Sir, the Russians are laying down their cruise missile nukes before the U.N. Someone must have forgotten to tell the shipyard that the Cold War is over. Or maybe they’re finishing this thing to provide jobs.” He was just testing.
“We know what we see. Commander.” Donchez stood up, his face stony. “Come on back to my office. I’ve got something to show you.”
Back in the admiral’s office Pacino sat in a deep easy chair and accepted a cigar from Donchez’s humidor. The sky outside the plate glass windows was dark. Pacino’s watch said it was almost eight in the evening. His stomach growled. Donchez’s head was stuck in a safe, looking for something. Finally he found it. Pacino picked up Donchez’s lighter, a worn Zippo with the emblem of the USS Piranha, SSN-637, lead ship of the class. Donchez had commanded her years before. Pacino lit the cigar and tasted the smooth smoke on his tongue. When the admiral sat back in his chair, his expression was dark. He flipped Pacino a bound report marked “SECRET” in black letters on the binding.
“What’s this?” Pacino asked.
“It’s been more than twenty years, Mikey,” he said. “It isn’t declassified yet. The report on the loss of the Stingray.” Donchez’s tongue was thick.
“Admiral, why are you showing me this?” Pacino felt like he did the day he was a plebe and Donchez had come to the Officer of the Watch’s office and told him his father was gone.
“It’s exactly what I told you that day. I wrote that.”
“Yes, sir?”
“And it’s all bullshit, pure bullshit.” Donchez’s voice wavered.
“What do you mean?” His old, faint suspicions at the time reviving.
“Mikey, that report as written would suggest that your dad screwed up. Didn’t turn the ship in time to inactivate the hot-run torpedo. Didn’t set material condition in time.” Donchez looked down at his desk and continued softly.
“Commander Anthony Pacino was the best damned combat submarine officer I ever knew. Except for one.” He looked back up at Pacino, who said nothing. “Patch Pacino did not die in the Atlantic Ocean. And he didn’t die from his own damned torpedo. Patch Pacino was a hero, which are in short supply, especially these days. The USS Stingray was on a top-secret operation under the polar icecap. She was getting an SPL of a VICTOR III.”
Donchez walked over to a wood cabinet and opened twin doors, revealing a large television monitor. He took a VCR tape out of the safe and inserted it in the VCR deck below the monitor. Pacino shivered from the cold of the office, which only a moment before had felt comfortable. He watched as the TV picture went from fuzz to focus on a minisubmarine hanging from several cables. A submersible. The cables lowered the submersible into the sea. Donchez began a commentary, his voice noticeably hoarse.
“This is a submersible that was used by Doctor Robert Powell of Woods Hole. The guy who went down to the Titanic and the Bismarck. Well, he also took this baby down to the Thresher, our sub that sank in ‘63. The submersible was designed to dive to Russian submarine wrecks and recover data. It has three spherical pressure hulls, its own manipulator arms and thrusters, and a remotely piloted vehicle, an eyeball. It can carry a video camera into tight spots.”
“Last year we decided to try to find the Stingray’s wreck under the polar icepack. Instead of using a sidescan sonar from a survey ship we had to cut holes in the ice, drop a sonar probe down and listen. For a year we came up with nothing. We drilled, dropped and listened at hundreds of sites. Finally we found it, made an icecamp and sent the submersible down.”
The TV picture showed an encampment in the arctic, tents and Quonset huts gathered around lifting-derricks. It also showed the submersible being dropped through a deep hole in the ice.
“We found the Stingray’s remains under 11,500 feet of very cold water. The initial shots on this tape were taken from the remote swimmer camera that was sent to the interior of the hull’s wreckage. This shot is of the bow compartment.”
The inside of the Stingray was all wreckage, mangled pipes and pieces of steel. Pacino tried to speak but his voice was gone, his throat thick.
“This is the operations compartment,” Donchez continued as the view shifted. It was like staring into an open coffin, Pacino thought, wondering why Donchez would subject him to it.
“We did find something recognizable here.” The light from the remote eyeball’s floodlight wavered as it swam by a grotesquely bent frame. An object came into view slowly, then focused. It was a baseball cap, the thread embroidery still plainly legible above and below the submarine dolphins: USS STINGRAY SSN-589.
Pacino felt a sudden exhaustion, like a shock wave.
The TV view shifted to an outside shot. “This was taken with the video on the main cameras of the submersible,” Donchez said. The disembodied sail came into view with sand in the background, one fairwater plane buried in the sand. “The sail was ripped away from the main hull by hydrodynamic forces. Part of the hull was flattened like a wing. The hull hit the bottom at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Back aft you can see that the hull, instead of flattening like the forward parts, was accordioned. The conical hull was forced inward, compressing the smaller part of the cone into the larger part. The force required to do this was immense. Here’s the bow compartment, which didn’t crush like the rest of the hull. It was equalized with sea pressure.”
The video shot showed the rounded bow compartment, the torpedo doors rusted at the far point of the hull’s nosecone. The shot showed the hull coming around. Soon the flank of the bow was in the picture, a gaping hole in it. Donchez stopped the tape at the shot of the hole in the hull. “Mikey, you’ve got a Phd in mechanical engineering. You tell me, was this an explosion inside or outside the hull?”
Pacino slowly rose from his seat and walked to the TV. His back was wet with cold sweat, his khaki shirt stuck to his back. He pointed to the star-shaped fingers of the jagged edge of the ten-foot-diameter hole.
“These points of the hole go in, not out. It was an external explosion. Stingray was gunned down, wasn’t she. Admiral,” Pacino said, a statement, not a question. No more guessing or wondering now.
Donchez barely nodded.
“Why was this kept secret? Why was it covered up—”
“Mikey, you’ve been up north. You know about the game. At the time it seemed the thing to do. Should we have whined to the U.N.? What would we say to Congress when they demanded to know how in hell a Soviet could sneak up on one of our best and put it on the bottom? What would become of our northern surveillance? How could we tell the world that we knew what they’d done when the SOSUS network that discovered it was highly secret?”
Pacino said nothing at first, then: “So why have you decided to show this to me? After all these years?”
Donchez turned off the TV and pulled out the VCR tape. In the heavy silence that followed he opened his safe, returning the sinking report and the VCR tape, at the same time removing a purple file folder. He slammed the heavy door of the safe and spun the tumbler, finally turning to face Pacino, whose face was tight with anger at the scene of the Stingray’s control room. He slapped the purple folder on the desk in front of Pacino.
“Open it.”
Pacino did. Inside, staring back at him, was the face of a man in a Russian Navy uniform, four stars on his epaulettes. Thick graying hair hung over a dark face, lined by the years yet still commanding. The eyes seemed to stare off into the distance, slightly narrowed.